Hasta La Gadget!

Listen, you know the drill by now: Macworld is less than a week away, and that causes a Cupertino-sized rumor mill to fill up with hints of new / refreshed hardware of all shapes and sizes. The crew at TUAW claim they’ve heard from sources that a new Mac mini will be unveiled with an aluminum finish, a Time Capsule-esque “lip,” and a SATA optical drive that can be customized as a second HDD instead. Additionally, TechCrunch says it has three independent sources that confirm there’s a large iPod touch is coming next Fall with a 7 or 9-inch screen. There’s no indication if they expect a Macworld announcement here, but if true, we expect the cargo pants industry to react accordingly. Finally, and possibly related to the TechCrunch rumor, a Taiwan news site claims Quanta Computers is expecting to add Apple and Sony (is that you, Vaio P?) as clients for manufacturing netbooks in 2009. For those playing along at home, at some point next year we should expect a bigger iPod touch, a netbook, a smaller iPhone, a revised iMac, a revised Mac mini, and absolutely no love at all for the Mac Pro.

Read – Large form iPod touch to launch Fall ’09
Read – Rumor watch: new Mac mini go for launch
Read – Quanta expects zero YoY NB shipment growth in Q4, 2008

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Apple rumor roundup: aluminum Mac minis and supersized iPod touches originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Best Buy is marketing netbooks as companions to your primary computer — which just goes to show how poorly understood these miniature devices really are.

In a long-winded Flash presentation, Best Buy stresses that netbooks are low-powered computers meant to be purchased "as a companion for your laptop."

That’s a pretty outdated generalization. Maybe before our economy got thrown into a bag of hurt, Best Buy would be reasonable for trying to sell netbooks as complementary devices. But with consumers tightening their spending in a recession, we can expect them to turn to netbooks as their next primary computers.

Likewise, we can expect manufacturers to market netbooks as serious devices for business users. (Think bigger screens, longer battery life, better keyboards.) MSI is already getting a head start with its next version of the popular Wind netbook, which sports a sharper, more professional design than its predecessor.

I myself am a Wind owner, and though it took me a little bit of time to get used to the smaller keyboard, I find I’m using the netbook more than my MacBook Pro. When I’m doing work at home, I simply attach my Wind to an external display. And when I’m on the go, I bring along a wireless mouse.

Liliputing’s Brad Linder spotted the Best Buy ad and quibbled a bit about why he doesn’t like the word "netbook." I definitely agree with him: Netbook is not only kind of a weird word; it just doesn’t do these devices justice. I prefer the term "mini notebook," but I use netbook more often now that it’s become a mainstream word.

See Also:

• Tiny Notes Net Big Gains: The Netbook Revolution
• Using the Word ‘Netbook’ Could Get You Sued
• Cheap, Easy-to-Mod NetBooks Are a Hacker’s Paradise

Photo: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com

After playing with a prototype of Intel’s Convertible Classmate, it more or less confirmed what I had suspected: there are some neat ideas at play, but there’s a reason why it’s aimed at schools.

From the outset, Intel’s goal with the Classmate line was to create a cheap, durable laptop that could be useful in a classroom. As such, Intel gave the Classmate tablet an 8.9-inch touchpanel, 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 802.11n wi-fi, 1 GB RAM, a 60 GB HDD (or up to 8 GB of flash storage), a days worth of battery life and a weight under three pounds.

The computer itself is on par with most other netbooks in terms of build quality. Nothing feels super flimsy, the 1024×600 resolution screen is sharp, and when using it as a tablet, it sits comfortably in the hand. The keyboard and trackpad are pretty decent sized, going toe to toe with the HP Mini or the MSI Wind in that regard. And it even has a webcam that can rotate to either face the user or look out in the other direction.

Messing around with some of the apps, it’s clear Intel did more than slap a touchscreen on a XP laptop and call it a tablet—they went one step further, adding the necessary hardware and software enhancements to make it as simple to use as possible.

For example, the Convertible Classmate has a quick launch panel that’s been optimized for use with the touchscreen, with big icons, and other touch friendly elements. And when the Classmate is folded into tablet mode, there’s a dedicated button that brings up the quick launch screen.

And not only will they be making the hardware as capable as possible for the educational arena, but they’ll be working with developers and OEM’s directly to make sure everything is optimized for the Classmate. One specific company they’re working with is Lego, whose Mindstorms kits are popular with educators.

Intel also put some thought into how kids would be using the Convertible Classmate specifically, and calibrated the touchscreen so that it wouldn’t recognize palm contact when kids are writing with the stylus. They found that most kids write with the palm down on the table, and if they didn’t adjust for that with the tablet, it would have caused many input problems.

But that also involved a trade off. Because they didn’t want to increase the price and have to use a capacitive/multitouch panel to enable palm detection, they had to lower the sensitivity of the resistive touchscreen in addition to using software fixes. As a result, the screen requires a bit of a heavier press to get it to recognize your input, which from what I could tell, doesn’t make it the most finger friendly.

Touchscreen issues aside, the presumable lack of consumer-centric touch app support, missing features like bluetooth and a pretty generic design will likely keep it entrenched in its educational niche. But considering that’s exactly what they’re gunning for, you can’t exactly call that a bad thing. [Classmate on Giz]